file: /pub/resources/text/contemp: colson.democracy.txt
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CAN WE BE GOOD WITHOUT GOD?
Chuck Colson
This speech was delivered in January, 1993, at a seminar
sponsored by Hillsdale College's Shavano Institute for National
Leadership. The seminar was called "Culture Wars: The Battle over
Family Values." This speech is reprinted in _Imprimis_ (the
magazine of Hillsdale College) April 1991, Volume 22, number 4.
Reprinted by permission of Imprimis, the monthly journal of
Hillsdale College. For a free subscription, call 1-800-437-2268.
Copyright (C) _Imprimis_, Hillsdale College. All rights reserved.
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Last December, newspapers ran a striking photograph of a
group of people held at bay by armed guards. They were not
rioters or protestors; they were Christmas carolers. The town of
Vienna, Virginia, had outlawed the singing of religious songs on
public property. So these men, women, and children were forced to
sing "Silent Night" behind the barricades, just as if this were
Eastern Europe after communist rule instead of Christmas in
American in 1992.
We have spent the past 30 years determined to secularize our
society. Some months before the incident in Virginia, the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled in _Lee vs. Weisman_ that a rabbi who
delivered a very politically correct "To Whom It May Concern"
prayer at a Rhode Island junior high commencement had violated
the constitutional rights of a fifteen-year-old student in the
audience. The Court said, in effect, that the girl must be
legally protected against listening to views she disagreed with.
There was a time when it was a mark of civility to listen
respectfully to different views; now you have a constitutional
right to demand that those views are not expressed in your
presence.
In another case that went all the way to the Supreme Court,
visual religious symbols have been banned. Zion, Illinois, in the
"heartland of America," was forced to eliminate the cross
featured in its city seal, because the justices ruled it a breach
of the First Amendment.
In education, the same kind of court-enforced secularism has
been so successful that teachers may hand out condoms in school,
but they are forbidden to display a copy of the Ten Commandments
on a bulletin board. Students, meanwhile, may indulge in almost
any kind of activity in school, but they are forbidden to pray.
The Supreme Court is not the only institution out to protect
us from the "threat" faith poses. The assault on religious
believers has been fierce. Cardinal O'Connor has been excoriated
by the _New York Times_ for even suggesting that he might deny
the sacraments to a pro-choice legislator (This was the same _New
York Times_ that praised a Louisiana archbishop who refused to
administer communion to a segregationist legislator in 1962.)
In the February of 1993, the _Washington Post_ featured a
front-page article that characterized evangelical Christians as
"largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command." If a journalist
said that about any other group in America, he would be fired on
the spot, but the _Post_ didn't fire anyone. It merely expressed
surprise that many readers found the description offensive. A few
days later, one of the bemused editors explained that they felt
they were simply printing something that is "universally
accepted."
It is no wonder that Peter Berger, professor of sociology at
Boston University, says that if you look around the world you
will find that the most religious country in the world is India,
and the most irreligious country is Sweden - and that America is
an interesting combination of Indians who are governed by Swedes.
A POST-CHRISTIAN SOCIETY
These Swedes have done their job well. In 1962, polls
indicate that at least 65 percent of all Americans believed the
Bible to be true. In 1992, polls indicate that only 32 percent
do, while 50 percent say that they actually fear fundamentalists.
If the polls are right, our Judeo-Christian heritage is no longer
the foundation of our values. We have become a post-Christian
society.
The process of "shedding" our religion began with the
cultural revolution of the 1960s, which exalted existentialism
and a kind of "live for the moment, God is dead or irrelevant"
philosophy. Today, that Sixties philosophy has become mainstream;
it is in the White House; it is in the poetry of Maya Angelou, it
is in every walk of life. This is not to say that people aren't
going to church. Forty-four percent of the American people still
attend religious services regularly. But we live in a Donahue-
ized culture in which we sit and watch, hour by hour, the
banality that passes for knowledge on television, and we rarely
think about issues in terms of Judeo-Christian truth. We hear
carolers singing "Silent Night" or an invocation at a public
ceremony and we are filled with trepidation; we are worried that
we are infringing upon the rights of nonbelievers. We see the
symbol of the cross and we feel compelled to paint it out because
it might violate the principle of the separation of church and
state. We exalt tolerance, not truth, as the ultimate value.
THE CITY OF MAN
Can we really sustain a city of man without the influence of
God? St. Augustine argued that it was impossible.
Any society, especially a free society, depends on a moral
consensus and on shared assumptions: What is ultimate reality?
What is meaningful in life? By what standards should we be
governed? These common values are the glue that holds society
together.
In America, the glue is wearing pretty thin. We are in the
middle of an identity crisis in which we are attempting to
redefine our basic values all over again. We can no longer assume
that right and wrong have clear meanings or that there is
universal truth. After all, pollsters tell us that sixty-seven
percent of the American people say there is no such thing.
What we fail to realize, however, is that rejecting
transcendental truth is tantamount to committing national
suicide. A secular state [typist's note: does CC mean society
instead of state, or does he really expect the state to be a
moral tutor?] cannot cultivate virtue - an old-fashioned truth
you don't hear much in public discourse these days. In his
classic novel, _The Brothers Karamazov_, the 19th century Russian
novelist Dostoyevsky asked, essentially, "Can man be good without
God?" In every age, the answer has been no. Without the
restraining influence on their nature, men will destroy
themselves. That restraining influence might take many abstract
forms, as it did for the Greeks and Romans, or it may be the God
of the Old and the New Testaments. But it has always served the
same purpose.
Even before Dostoyevsky posed his timeless question, an 18th
century German professor of logic and metaphysics, Immanuel Kant,
had already dismissed it as irrelevant. God exists, said Kant,
but he is separate from the rest of life. Over here are the
things that we can empirically know; over there are things we can
accept only on faith. What does this do to ethics? Kant's answer
was to separate them from faith; we can, on our own, with only
our rational capacities to depend upon, develop what he called
the "categorical imperative." He explained: "Act as if the maxim
from which you were to act were to become through your will a
universal law."
This rational, subjective view is the basis of ethics being
taught in nearly every school in America today, from Public
Grammar School No. 1 to Harvard Business School. Students are
never exposed to traditional moral teaching in school, only to
rationalism. Pragmatism and utilitarianism are substituted for
Judeo-Christian ethics, and students are taught they have the
inner capacity to do good rationally, apart from God.
THE DANGER OF SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS
Nothing could be more dangerous. Let me give you a case
study: Chuck Colson. I grew up in the Depression years. My dad,
who was the son of a Swedish immigrant, used to tell me two
things on Sunday afternoon. Although no one in my family had ever
gone to college, he said, "If you work hard, you can get to the
top. That's the American dream." And the second thing he used to
say was "Always tell the truth. No matter what you do in life,
always tell the truth."
I kept both these pieces of advice in mind as I grew up,
earned a scholarship to college and then went on to law school. I
also remembered them when I joined a very successful law firm and
years later in 1969 when President Nixon asked me to come to work
at the White House. I took everything I had earned and put it
into a blind trust. (If you want to make a small fortune, let me
tell you how: You take a large fortune and put it in a blind
trust). I did everything to avoid even the appearance of a
conflict of interest. I passed unsolicited gifts on to my
employees. I refused to see people whom I had practiced law with
or made business deals with - I mean, I _really_ had studied
Kant's categorical imperative, and I _knew_ that I would always
do right.
What happened? I went to prison.
Why? Because we are never more dangerous than when we are
feeling self-righteous. We have an infinite capacity for this
feeling and for the self-justification that accompanies it. It
was only when Jesus Christ came into my life that I was able to
see myself for who I am. Indeed, it is only when we all turn to
God that we begin to see ourselves as we really are - as fallen
sinners desperately in need of His restraint and His grace.
Kant's philosophy, like much Enlightenment thought, was
based on a flawed view of human nature that held that men are
basically good, and, if left to their own desires, will almost
always do good things. It was also dead wrong in assuming that
the categorical imperative could take the place of moral law.
Just because men can think the right thing does not mean that
they will heed it. Remember Pierre, one of the central characters
in Tolstoy's _War and Peace_? Torn by spiritual agonies, he cried
out to God "Why is it that I know what is right and I do what is
wrong?" We can know what is right, but we don't always have the
will to do what is right.
HOW SHALL WE LIVE?
In books like _Mere Christianity_ and _The Abolition of
Man_, the 20th century British Christian apologist C.S. Lewis
attempted to refute Kant and make a powerful intellectual case
for the City of God that did not wall it[self?] off from the city
of man. In an essay entitled "Men Without Chests," he drew an
analogy between the spiritual life and the body that sums up his
objections to the supreme rationalism of the Enlightenment. The
head, Lewis said, is reason, and the stomach is passion or
appetite. It needs the chest, which is spirit, to restrain our
bases passions and appetites.
Yet after World War II schools began to teach ethics based
on subjective standards without transcendent moral truths. Lewis
challenged this, writing, "We make men without chests and expect
of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked
to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings
to be fruitful." This is what we are doing in America today. We
are taking away the spiritual element and abandoning morality
based on religious truth, counting instead on our heads and our
subjective feelings to do what is right.
In our zeal to accommodate our so-called enlightened and
tolerant age, we have lost the ideal of public virtue. I am
reminded of Samuel Johnson, who, upon learning that one of his
dinner guests believed morality was really a sham, said to his
butler, "Well, if he really believes that there is no distinction
between virtue and vice, let us count the spoons before he
leaves." Today, there aren't any spoons left to count. Look at
Washington, Wall Street, academia, sports, the ministry - all the
spoons are gone because we can no longer distinguish between
virtue and vice.
Recovering our ability depends on asking the right
questions. Our brightest and best leaders are concerned with the
question, "How shall we be governed?" But in the Book of Ezekiel
the Jews asked: "How shall we live?" It doesn't matter who
governs if society has no spiritual element to guide it. Unless
we learn how to live - as men with chests - we are doomed.
THE CITY OF GOD
I have seen this truth most powerfully in the area in which
I've been called to spend my life. With the help of my friend
Jack Eckerd and others, I work with men and women in prison in 54
countries around the world. The crisis is grave. In Washington,
D.C., for example, 46 percent of the inner city black population
between the ages of 18 and 31 is either in prison, on parole, or
on probation. America as a whole has the highest per capita rate
of incarceration in the world, and, for the last 25 years, the
crime rate has gone up every year. We can't build prisons fast
enough. In the last seven years, we have seen a 120 percent
increase in murders committed by those between the ages of 18 and
20. According to the same sources, twenty percent of all
schoolchildren carry a weapon.
Criminologist James Q. Wilson, among others, has tried to
identify the root cause of this epidemic of violence. When he
began his inquiry, he was certain that he would discover that in
the great period of industrial revolution in the latter half of
the 19th century there was a tremendous increase in crime. But,
to his astonishment, he discovered a decrease. And then he looked
at the years of the Great Depression. Again, there was a
significant decrease in crime. Frustrated by these findings which
upset all our preconceived notions, Wilson decided to search for
a single factor to correlate. The factor he found was religious
faith.
When crime should have been rising in the late 1800s because
of rapid urbanization, industrialization, and economic
dislocation, Victorian morality was sweeping across America. It
was a time of intense spirituality. It was not until the
conscious rejection of Victorian morality during the Roaring
Twenties that crime went up. This was the era when Sigmund
Freud's views were coming into vogue among "thinking" Americans:
people weren't evil, just misguided or mistreated, or they
required better environments. Sin was regarded as a lot of
religious claptrap.
The crime rate did not decline again until the Great
Depression, a time of people banding together in the face of
crisis. Wilson concluded, therefore, that crime was in large part
caused by a breakdown of morality. Since 1965 the crime rate has
steadily risen. In the same period, religious faith has waned. We
have told people there are no absolutes and that they are not
responsible for their own behavior. They are simply victims of a
system that isn't working anymore and they don't have to worry
about it because the government is going to fix it for them. We
thought that in this brave new world we could create the perfect
secular utopia. But the secular utopia is in reality the
nightmare as we walk through the dark, rotten holes we can
prisons all across America.
In this context, it always amazes me when I listen to
politicians say, "We are going to win the war on drugs by
building prisons, appointing more judges, and putting more police
on the beat." I remember when President Bush announced the "War
on Drugs." Having spent seven months in prison, there wasn't one
night that I did not smell marijuana burning. If you can get
marijuana into a prison, with watchtowers, inspections, and
prison guards, you can get it into a country. You can send the
U.S. Marines to Columbia to burn all the fields, seal all the
borders, and build all the prisons you want, but you won't stop
drug use in this country because it isn't a problem of supply, it
is a problem of demand. When there is no greater value in the
lives of so many people than simply fulfilling individual desires
and gratifications, then crime and drug abuse become inevitable.
The soaring crime rate is powerful testimony to the failure of
the city of man, deprived of the moral influence of the City of
God.
If we cannot be good without God, how can we sustain public
virtue in society? We cannot do it through the instrument of
politics. Alasdair MacIntyre, moral philosopher at Notre Dame,
says that "Politics has become civil war carried on by other
means." Without moral authority to call upon, our elected leaders
are reduced to saying "We can't say that this is right and that's
wrong. We simply prefer that you wouldn't murder." And crime and
drug abuse are not the only results of this loss of moral
authority. Forty-four percent of the baby boomers say that there
is no cause that would lead them to fight and die for their
country.
In the city of man, there is no moral consensus, and without
a moral consensus there can be no law. Chairman Mao expressed the
alternative well: in his view, morality begins at the muzzle of a
gun.
There has never been a case in history in which a society
has been able to survive for long without a strong moral code.
And there has never been a time when a moral code has not been
informed by religious truth. Recovering our moral code - our
religious truth - is the only way our society can survive. The
heaping ash remains at Auschwitz, the killing fields of Southeast
Asia, and the frozen wastes of the gulag remind us that the city
of man is not enough; we must also seek the city of God.
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